Confession is Good for the Soul
by lazy-like-a-fox
Summary: Aziraphale is shaken up after a strange encounter in the park and goes to Crowley for reassurance.


Craig paused as he caught sight of the young woman. She was pacing and looked a bit lost. 'What a vision.' Craig thought. The woman had mousy hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a pink floral print dress and a little fuzzy white sweater that reminded Craig of a rabbit. It looked soft. It was hard to tell from such a distance, but it didn't look like she was wearing much make-up. Craig disliked make-up.

He crept a little closer. It was early morning in Saint James Park, and there weren't a lot of other people around. None at the moment, in fact, and he didn't want her to notice him watching her and become alarmed.

No, she had natural beauty, he decided. She probably didn't even realize how pretty she was. She was just Craig's type. He hated women who got tarted-up and walked around looking like whores. This girl looked sweet though. She didn't look like the type to give Craig attitude. She looked soft. She looked vulnerable, pacing back and forth like that, like a feather being twitched in front of a cat.

He started to approach her, but just as he did, she caught sight of an older man approaching from the other direction and lit up like a switch had been thrown. Her worried expression changed to joy as she hurried over to him and took his hand.

Craig growled at the snub. Bitch.

He continued down the path. He had to brush it off and find another friend before the park got too crowded. He came upon a man sitting alone on a bench, reading a book. He looked a little older than Craig, and dressed like he was much older, but he looked soft, and it was the softness that Craig needed, after all. He had taken one man before, and it had been fine. A man's screams where just as good as a woman's, as long as he was soft. This man was a bit plump, like a little child, and he had hands that looked like they'd never done a day of hard work in his life. Craig licked his lips. Definitely soft.

Craig had been perfectly silent, he was sure, but the man looked up at him with a start, as if Craig had cocked a gun. Well, now or never then! Craig dashed towards him and raised a hand in a friendly greeting but wore a worried expression on his face.

"Can you- can you help me sir? It's my son. He climbed a tree, right-just over there and can't get down. I want to go fetch help, or a ladder, or something, but he's so scared, and I can't just leave him alone…If you could come over and wait with him, for just a minute, I'd be so grateful to you." He said, motioning towards a dense patch of trees a safe distance from the path.

The other man had stood, but had then stayed completely still, as Craig jogged towards him. Now that they were within arm's length of one another, the other man spoke.

"Stop." He placed a finger on Craig's forehead, and something in Craig slowed down and went to sleep. "Who are you?"

"I'm…the seventh son…"

"I'm not the first person you've…had these feelings for, am I?"

"No."

"How many?"

"Five."

"Why?"

"For protection. After I make them mine, they stay with me forever. I need my friends to watch over me."

"Ah…" Aziraphale murmured. "You're very sick, aren't you?"

"Yes."

Aziraphale cupped the man's skull gently in both of his perfectly manicured hands, his thumbs resting on the man's temples. His hands stayed perfectly still, but his mind _pushed_.

"Crowley? Hello? Please pick up Crowley!" The phone was still ringing, but Aziraphale didn't trust that damn ansaphone not to cut him off and thought it was probably better to start talking as soon as possible.

"Hello?"

"Hello? Yes, this is a message for Crowley! C-R-O"

"Yes, angel, it's me! What the hell is wrong?"

"I-I-I need to see you."

"Where are you?"

"I'm almost to your flat."

"Ok, I'm home."

"Of course you are; you answered the phone! Crowley? Are you still there?"

"All right, I'm coming down to get you."

"No! Stay on the line, please! Crowley?"

"It's a cell phone angel! Look, see? Here I am, across the street." He waved as he spoke, and didn't hang up until he had an arm around Aziraphale's shoulders and was propelling him towards the elevator. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Aziraphale this rattled, unless it was the almost-agedon, but his control had been relaxed by drink then.

He locked the door to his flat behind them with a thought and pulled Aziraphale down with him onto his immaculate white couch, squeezing him tight.

"Get off; I'm not in the mood!"

"I'm not- I'm trying to be comforting here!"

Aziraphale stopped trying to pull away and settled into silence against him.

"Ok, what happened? Have you heard something from heaven?"

"No, it's nothing like that."

That was reassuring, on one level, but alarming on another, because what had happened then? Aziraphale didn't seem inclined to enlighten him.

"What happened?"

"I was in the park this morning, when a human approached me. He had such a horrible anger and fear and confusion in him that I'm not sure when I've ever felt anything like it that close up."

It was part of Aziraphale's nature to be able to sense emotions, and sometimes they could have an effect on him, Crowley knew, though he had trouble imagining what that was like. He had fallen, apparently loosing that ability in the process, before humans existed.

The emotions of a single human weren't enough to trouble him, and Aziraphale had told Crowley that even living in a place as populated as London usually didn't either, because the negative and positive emotions at play in a crowd tended to cancel each other out. It was only when he was in a place where emotions tended towards one extreme or the other that they became more than white noise. Crowley knew that Aziraphale avoided tube stations during rush hour for this reason, and that he sometimes snuck off to maternity wards and watched families looking at their new babies, when he felt low. And maybe that was part of the reason that Aziraphale spent so much time holed up in his little shop with only his books for company. But still, a single person's state of mind shouldn't have had this much on an influence on Aziraphale, no matter how upset the person was.

"He was one of those serial murderers you hear about on the television. He was…so very disordered. I could tell that he was thinking about doing atrocious things to me, so I stopped him and questioned him, and he said that he had done those things to five innocent people already and I knew that he was just going to keep on doing those things to people, so I had to stop him."

It came out in a rush once Aziraphale got started, and he buried his face in Crowley's shoulder, as if trying to crush the words. Crowley tried rubbing soothing circle on his back, but Aziraphale's shoulders only started to hitch in a way that Crowley was not at all prepared to deal with.

Should he threaten to beat the guy up? That was standard procedure in these kind of situations, right? Except that Aziraphale had already dealt with the guy to his own satisfaction, right?

"If I'd been there, I would have…kicked his ass?" Crowley ventured, running a hand through Aziraphale's hair. It didn't sound right at all, coming out of Crowley's mouth, and of course it wasn't true. Crowley would have been less hands-on, but much more creative. "But I don't mean that you shouldn't have gone to the park alone, or anything like that…I mean, you're a grown angel. You were never in any danger to begin with, er…."

Shit, Crowley has so crap at this! He just wanted to tell Aziraphale that he had no reason to be afraid, but then he wouldn't be 'validating his feelings'. That was a phrase Crowley had heard on a talk show, and he was fairly sure that it meant you weren't to tell someone else how they were supposed to feel. You were just supposed to let them cry it out and say 'there there', even if there really was no actual reason for Aziraphale to be this upset, and even if he was usually rational enough to know that there wasn't any way a human, no matter how psycho, could actually hurt him, and even if him not being his usual rational self was really alarming.

"Look, you have every right to be scared or angry or whatever you're feeling. I'm sure that was a really horrible experience and you shouldn't have had to go through that." Aziraphale made a disturbing snuffling sound and looked up at Crowley. He wasn't actually crying, but his face was puffy and he was breathing oddly.

"No, you don't understand. I-I reshaped his brain Crowley. It was so full of knots…and I untied them all."

"You set him right."

"What kind of person does something like that?"

"You do. It's part of your- your duty to heal people. You didn't put anything in there that wasn't already there, right? Just, untied the knots?"

"I don't know, I…he was so empty…from the time that he was just a small child. I might have. I'm not sure… I only wanted to help him Crowley!" the assertion was made in self-defense, as if he'd forgotten that he wasn't on trial before all of heaven. But Crowley only smiled at the apparent break in the weather and continued carding softly through Aziraphael's hair.

"Of course you did. Shhh. I know you."

Azirapael's wasn't done feeling guilty yet, though, and if he couldn't find anyone else to take up the task of judging him, he would have to keep on doing it himself.

"No," he pulled away and shook his head, "I overstepped my bounds this time…and I – Crowley, I didn't just suggest he try being a little nicer, I changed him so much I might as well have made him another person. I had no right to do that. And I let him remember what he had done! I didn't erase those memories, because he had to tell the police what he had done, but I made it so he knows right from wrong and now he has to live with what he did."

Crowley remained silent. Maybe that's what he would have done, if he'd been present while some crazy bastard planned to hurt Aziraphael. Make him capable of understanding how _wrong _a thing that was and leave him to wallow in it. Then again, no. He may have been called the most subtle of all creatures a very long time ago, but in this case his approach probably would have been a little more direct.

"I'd have done the same thing Angel. Anyone would have, I mean. Only thing to do. Couldn't let him keep doing what he was doing and, like you said, he had to go confess to the police, right? Had to give the families closure. " Aziraphale still looked unconvinced. "And maybe he had a right to his memories? Maybe making him forget would have been overstepping yourself? Er, now he has a fighting chance to do right, right? Become a good person and...Look, I don't know…just- you did your best, just don't let it become a habit, alight?"

"…Alright. Crowley, if you thought I was doing wrong, you would tell me, right?"

"I would."

"I mean it Crowley. I can trust you to be perfectly honest with me, even if you think it will hurt my feelings to hear it?"

It didn't even seem to occur to him to worry that Crowley might lie in order to tempt him into sinning….only that he might lie to spare Aziraphale's feelings? How had this happened? How had Crowley been pressed into service to be an angel's conscience?

"You'd listen to me? If I told you something you were doing was wrong, you'd just take my word for it and stop?"

"Yes."

"Yes, I promissss."

"Alright then…" the tears he had been trying to shed finally fell, just two big round ones, and he whipped them away and hugged Crowley. "Thank you."


End file.
